Woodstock Opera House

There is a small-city opera house in Woodstock, Illinois, that launched two of the twentieth century's most significant careers, served as city hall and fire station simultaneously, and later stood in for a Pennsylvania groundhog town in one of Hollywood's most beloved films. For a building that cost twenty-five thousand dollars to construct, it punches well above its weight.

The Woodstock Opera House was built in eighteen eighty-nine and held its first performance in eighteen ninety, designed by architect Smith Hoag. Like many Midwestern civic buildings of the era, it was built to serve multiple purposes at once: the lower floors held the police department, fire department, and city offices; the upper floors contained a proper theater with a stage and seating gallery. From the day it opened, the building was the cultural heart of McHenry County.

But the Opera House's lasting claim on history comes from a string of remarkable tenants. In nineteen thirty-one, a precocious sixteen-year-old named Orson Welles graduated from the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock. He had already been performing on the Opera House stage during his years at Todd, and in nineteen thirty-four he returned to organize the Todd Theatre Festival, his first professional directorial work in America. The experience he gained in Woodstock would carry him directly to Broadway and eventually to Citizen Kane.

In nineteen forty-seven, a community theater group called the Woodstock Players began using the building. Among the young actors who came to study and perform were Paul Newman, Tom Bosley, Betsy Palmer, and Geraldine Page, a roster that reads like a casting call for the next two decades of American film and television.

The building survived, was significantly restored in the nineteen seventies, and in nineteen ninety-three became something else entirely. The fictional town square of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, when director Harold Ramis chose Woodstock as the location for Groundhog Day. Bill Murray spent his endless February second right here, on this square, in front of this opera house.

The building still operates as a working performing arts center today.